“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.”Thomas Merton
“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”Thomas Merton
“Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.”Thomas Merton
“To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.”Thomas Merton Seeds of Contemplation (1949).
“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds”Thomas Merton
“The biggest human temptation is … to settle for too little.”Thomas Merton As quoted in Forbes (4 August 1980).
“If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”Thomas Merton Source: Thoughts in Solitude
“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”Thomas Merton book No Man Is an IslandSource: No Man Is an Island
“The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.”Thomas Merton book No Man Is an IslandSource: No Man Is an Island
“When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.”Thomas Merton
“Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat… Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.”Thomas Merton Source: Thoughts in Solitude
“The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.”Thomas Merton
“For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.”Thomas Merton book No Man Is an IslandSource: No Man Is an Island
“I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.”Thomas Merton Source: The Sign of Jonas
“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost”Thomas Merton
“Be still:There is no longer any need of comment.It was a lucky windThat blew away his halo with his cares,A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.”Thomas Merton
“We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real… and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)”Thomas Merton Source: New Seeds of Contemplation